IN MY WORDS - Oxford Union president Luke Tryl

When Oxford Union president Luke Tryl, 20, invited BNP leader Nick Griffin and Holocaust denier David Irving to debate at a free speech forum, he became a pariah of the press and a target for protesters. He recalls a period of stress, threats and self-doubt.

‘I’d like to smash your face in till it bleeds’, said one letter in the run-up to the forum. I wanted to fight extremism but I’m not violent and this was something I had never experienced.

The media focus started to become intense a week before. There were live TV interviews and all of a sudden I was faced with a camera. It was scary and daunting. There were calls from MPs and members of the House of Lords; some speakers pulled out of the debate.

One thing which really upset me was an attempt to portray me as a public school toff when I’m from quite a working-class background – my grandparents were immigrants and I was the first in my family to go to university. It does upset you, as much as you try and detach yourself personally from it. You just want to say, look, I think the BNP are awful and abhorrent and I want to defeat them just as much as you do. But journalists had a signature of what they wanted me to be and that was what they wrote about. It was just a cheap shot at me. I smoked more, I lost weight.

There were times when I wasn’t sure whether I could carry on. I never thought there was a justification for stopping but at times the pressure was too much. I’m 20 years old.

On the day itself, the calls were just constantly coming in. It was definitely adrenaline that kept me going through the day. I’d be on the phone and there’d be two more calls waiting; some journalists said if you don’t get back to me in 30 minutes we’re going to say you wouldn’t comment. In the end I had to give my phone to someone else.

But the worst bit was when the protesters stormed the chamber. They’d been shouting ‘Kill Tryl’ earlier and I was worried about what they might do. The police were there but I get the feeling they didn’t want the event to happen. I was really disappointed with the protesters. When you effectively start inciting hatred, I don’t think you do the anti-fascist cause any favours.

We had to split the forum in two in the end, and I stayed with David Irving. Irving was just crazy. His arguments about free speech didn’t stand up. It was very weird meeting him and Griffin; they are both deeply unpleasant men.

That night, my friends walked me home, and I collapsed. We had Russell Brand in the next day so I had to be up again immediately. Most presidents spend their time getting drunk. They go to clubs, they have lots of parties. Previous presidents were ringing me up, saying, ‘Why are you doing this? You’re meant to be enjoying yourself.’ But I was constantly dealing with this – the most exciting period of my life, though I never enjoyed it for a moment.

People like attacking Oxford and it is easy to throw around allegations of student naivety. I regret the fact that it did get so out of control but I don’t think it I was naive. The media focus ended up being on the fact that the extremists were speaking rather than on the debate itself, and interesting, intelligent people were overshadowed. But I believe in the principle, I do think that debate is the best way to defeat extremists. Harold Macmillan described the Union as ‘the last bastion of free speech’ so if we can’t debate these people there, where can we debate them?

It was right that I was called to account, to defend the decision, but people said it was a publicity thing, which it was never, ever meant to be. That hurt.

I think this sort of thing can stay with you for life. My dad went to vote in Halifax when I was five; while he was in the polling station, I stood outside telling people to vote for John Major. So I’ve always been politically interested and this hasn’t put me off. In the future, I have to try and do something more meaningful.

Bending the rules - a gay man in a lads' mag world

A doctor and Oxford graduate became the first openly gay columnist for top lads' mag FHM. I talked to him about how it felt to stick out like a sore thumb.

In a room plastered with pictures of naked women, an FHM subeditor passed judgement on behalf of 300,000 straight, male readers. With a few clicks of the mouse, he designed a thumbs-up logo for page 54. It said: “He’s okay... for a gay!”

The Gay, also known as Gareth Chapman, is a student doctor from Scunthorpe who bent the rules by becoming the first openly gay columnist for the UK’s leading lads’ mag. Now, in an Oxford pub, the well-mannered Oxford University postgraduate seems an unlikely candidate.

“The Best Breasts in Britain and nude shots of Abi Titmuss were getting dull. FHM was dumbing down – they needed something a bit different,” says Chapman. The 23-year-old decided that a Queer Eye for the Straight Guy-type feature could work. “In a drunken haze one night, I emailed the features editor. He asked me to give him a ring. I was terrified,” he laughs for the first time since sitting down.

The Q&A column was commissioned. The ‘agony uncle’ would answer straight men’s questions from a gay man’s perspective, tackling issues from tableware to moustaches and from decorating to anal sex, in the magazine’s sardonic house style.

Chapman agreed to be photographed dressed as characters from the Village People as long as his identity was disguised. He explains: “I didn’t want people to think I was playing the gay guy just to be the extrovert. I said I would write under a pseudonym too. At Oxford medical school you’re not able to be overtly camp.”

The features show Chapman as a pouting construction worker, Chapman as a policeman, Chapman in leather. Underneath, the introduction to ‘Ask the Bender’ tries to excuse the appearance of a homosexual in this elite, chauvinistic lads’ mag world: “He has the best of both worlds: women love him and let him watch them undress. We’re sure he’s good at other stuff too – ironing, colour-matching, hairstyles and the like – but largely that’s it.”

The editorial input and the ‘He’s okay... for a gay!’ stamp were not Chapman’s ideas. “The logo made me pretty peeved,” he frowns. “And the title annoyed me. The column was a bit of a spoof but it was also meant to point to the fact that someone alternative had managed to get into FHM. They dropped the logo in later issues so maybe they got complaints. The derogatory ‘bender’ in the title stayed though.”

It is hard to marry this sober, sensitive man with his cuttingly coarse articles. One acerbic answer in the column advises Jim, London, to quit beer in favour of ‘designer cocktails’ to “take a leaf out the gay man’s book – that’s right, the pink one with glittery pages”, before coming on to Jim. Chapman sips on tap water as he reads.

“I imagine people think I’m quite dull compared to what I write,” he says. “Writing is my little outlet. Working with very ill people, you have to be professional and serious. It can be restrictive. But a lot of what you do is acting, communicating with people effectively. Medicine is a scientific art.

“People recognise that doctors need external interests, as long as we don’t flaunt those interests at work. I don’t have a different personality when I write, but I do have a different persona.”

Not everyone was impressed by Chapman’s artistic side. LGBT, the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender community, argued the column would not further their cause. Chapman nods pensively. “I never wanted to really fight for equality and bash down doors but, looking back, I was probably quite naive. The articles were short-lived and won’t have changed anyone’s opinion of gay people, but at least they got in.”

Chapman is now writing to magazines F*@K and Bent, which brand him ‘okay’ because of his sexuality, not in spite of it. And he is focusing on plans to work at an HIV clinic in Malawi, where homosexuality is not only castigated but illegal.

An ideal journalist? Revealing confidential sources

In Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband (1895), the disgraced MP Sir Robert Chiltern tells his friend Lord Arthur Goring:

“Weak? Do you really think, Arthur, that it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations that it requires strength, strength and courage, to yield to. To stake all one’s life on a single moment, to risk everything on one throw, whether the stake be power or pleasure, I care not – there is no weakness in that. There is a horrible, a terrible courage.”

Chiltern has committed a crime. He has broken the law and flouted the moral and ethical code. In striving to be an ideal husband, he has violated the trust of people close to him and jeopardised his illustrious career. But his deliberate decision to commit the crime, combined with its positive outcomes, lead him to insist that he possesses “a horrible, a terrible courage”.

Chiltern’s fictional plight resonates with the very real one of Nick Martin-Clark. The freelance journalist committed what many reporters consider a crime by naming a source whose confidentiality he had guaranteed. The episode left the source imprisoned for at least 24 years, Martin-Clark under witness protection for life, and the media facing a number of ethical questions.

In 1996, Clifford McKeown, a member of Northern Ireland’s Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF), shot Catholic taxi driver Martin McCormick in a randomly-chosen but calculated attack in Aghagallon, Co Armagh.

Six years on, McKeown – by now a prime suspect in the murder case and in jail for another offence – swore Martin-Clark to secrecy before admitting to the killing.
Martin-Clark broke his promise and wrote about the confession in the Sunday Times. He then helped police to convict McKeown for murder by submitting tape-recordings and appearing as a prosecution witness at the trial. Martin-Clark was condemned by most reporters in Ireland and expelled from the National Union of Journalists (NUJ).

While an ideal husband should never lie, an ideal journalist should never reveal the identity of a confidential source – so goes one argument. After the 2003 Hutton Inquiry highlighted the consequences of exposing sources, for example, Tim Crook claimed that the ‘never name a source’ maxim constitutes a deontological duty, an absolute.

But journalists do not report on or in an ideal world. And when each pillar upholding a journalist’s faith in media maxims is demolished, the journalist finds it increasingly difficult to justify the rule for its own sake, under the weight of his personal conscience and ethics. This is what happened to Martin-Clark.

In McKeown’s case, many of the justifications for protecting a source could be dismissed. McKeown was a reliable primary source with direct, criminal responsibility for the information he supplied. He was likely to be the only individual able to supply the compelling forensic evidence needed to help solve McGoldrick’s murder. He had stopped cooperating with Martin-Clark’s investigation into alleged collusion during The Troubles and was unlikely to be needed as a source in future.

Martin-Clark contended that many of the key justifications for remaining silent had been eliminated. He said: “McKeown was a boastful murderer whose protection would have served no public interest after he had broken an understanding that he would provide me with further information about collusion and the LVF. There was a clear public interest in solving a murder.”

His Sunday Times colleague Liam Clarke agreed and said that Martin-Clark “considered that his duty as a citizen and his duty as a human being outweighed his duty of confidentiality.”

Clarke and Martin-Clark suggest that protecting and pandering to the requests of a brutal murderer can be professionally desirable but, in this case, goes against moral and intuitive reason.

The NUJ deemed Martin-Clarke “not a fit and proper person” to continue his membership. The union was right to oust him for revealing a source and so breaching clause seven of their Code of Conduct, but their grounds for doing so missed the mark. In fact, Martin-Clark’s sense of injustice and his empathy for McGoldrick’s widow and children, one of whom was still unborn when he died, demonstrate that the reporter’s character was not to blame.

Martin-Clark’s actions were wrong and if I was to find myself in the same position, I would not repeat them. He tarnished the credibility of journalists around the world and endangered the lives of colleagues who had earned the trust of violent, suspicious informants while working in the political instability of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. One – Martin O’Hagan – became the first reporter killed in the troubles when he was murdered in 2001 by the same LVF that killed McGoldrick.

But what Martin-Clark did was not weak. It did not show weakness of character or make him an unfit or improper person. It took “a horrible, a terrible courage” to go against the advice and feeling of the mainstream, and in so doing his actions served a purpose.

Martin-Clark’s professionalism was compromised in this case and for that he is paying with the trauma of living under a witness protection programme. But the display of his fallibility did the world of journalism a favour by conveying an important statement: that journalism is not absolute and should not deal in absolutes.

We must always be wary of absolutist stances. As Walter Lippman said, whenever you hold your positions to be “perfect examples of some eternal principle or other, you are not talking, you are fighting.” Using Lippman’s terminology, journalism involves ‘talking’, or flexible exchange, rather than rigid maxims. Journalists continually ask questions of themselves and others, making decisions that depend on the individual case and the broader, changing arena.

The relationship between reporters and sources is an exchange – a ‘talk’, not a ‘fight’ – that must remain balanced, so that sources do not possess disproportionate power over reporters. For this reason, silence should not be the default setting for reporters. Philip Meyer observed: “To many people, the silence itself is the virtue [...]. What was once rational protection of sources has become a law of journalistic omerta.” The silence of non-disclosure can convey an impression of inertia or apathy that, if taken for granted, could allow sources to taunt journalists with confidential or deceptive information that cannot be questioned in a transparent public forum due to the Mafia-like code of silence that Meyer identifies.

Of course, reporters should not possess disproportionate power over sources either, which is why Martin-Clark was in the wrong. But he did achieve, perhaps inadvertently, a demonstration of the very freedom of speech that sources enjoy and that journalism itself promotes.

Former Washington Post editor Leonard Dowie warned that journalists should never be seen as “an arm of the law”. But neither must they be seen as an arm of their sources – as spokesmen or safe houses for criminals and the corrupt. They must never become faceless machines sticking unthinkingly to a code of conduct, without compassion or subjectivity, “morally disengaged and politically inactive”.

The professional shame and real-world danger brought about by Martin-Clark should not be repeated. He defied expectations and dissented, creating uncertainty and unpredictability. But as a one-off, revealing a source served to promote debate and humanise reporting, highlighting its complexity and its dilemmas. It reminded sources not to take journalists for granted, as a decision on whether or not to reveal a source is not made in weakness, but takes a “terrible courage”.